Month: October 2016

Felix went all in to help Adele with her final performance in acting class. Perhaps he was regretting that he hadn’t signed up for 201 with her; every time they hung out with friends from the first class, they said they missed him. Weeks before the end of semester, he had mapped out a plan for Adele. He chose the monologue, coached her through it line by line, designed the set, and did her hair and makeup. All because she looked like Bette Davis.

It wasn’t an easy three weeks.

There were times when Adele begged to abandon the project. One night she came really close to putting her foot down entirely. When she yet again failed to enunciate her lines with the proper Davis clarity, she tossed herself across the battered sectional in Felix’s basement. Hugging a pillow close to her chest, she suggested she might rather do the monologue from Fame, which she still remembered from high school. It was a little on the short side, but she even had the clothes she’d worn. The leg warmers were doing double duty as curtain tiebacks in her bedroom.

Felix wouldn’t hear of it.

“You’re destined for this role, Adele! Don’t be faint of heart…”

He motioned for her to stand, and she rolled her eyes, but she climbed out of the sunken cushions. She had the big eyes and the small mouth and if she could just learn to actually be dramatic and articulate all at once, while not dropping a line or forgetting a mark, then she’d be fine. His big obstacle was getting her to embrace the bigness of the part. Adele had a dry, close-lipped personality, but for this she’d need to have sweep and volume.

Secretly Adele thought the lines were corny, but Felix was protective of his heroes. “Bette exudes corruption once you get to the end and look back on it, but for at least the first half, you’re convinced she’s the classic woman wronged. She plays it so well.”

His eyes would drop to the floor each time he praised the long dead actress, as if embarrassed that Adele might feel inadequate by comparison. She could have told him she didn’t like that whole old style – people didn’t act like that anymore – but they’d had exhaustive talks about it in the past. He thought there simply wasn’t enough guts and saliva in modern theater.

That night they watched the movie together again. Maybe for the first time ever, Adele was glad she wasn’t stoned because there were some line readings that would give a nun church giggles. Glancing over at Felix, she saw a pleased little smile on his lips. With his dyed black hair and painted on brows and lips, he looked vampiric in the television light. Not that she would ever tell him; he was too vain about his looks already. He’d spent almost two months pay on green contact lenses to look like Louis from The Vampire Lestat. And one night he told her about an exhaustive face lightening regimen that involved peroxide and a nail brush.

He was silly, she thought then, growing frustrated with the movie.

“Can’t we turn it off and try the lines again?” she asked.

He agreed too readily and she wondered if subjecting her to the film had become a tactic.

“Feed me my line…”

He was about to when they heard a soft knock, telling them Felix’s mom had come down the steps and wanted to enter her son’s subterranean den.

“Hello?” Jean called out warmly.

Felix looked peeved, but Adele felt like she was getting a pardon.

“You two still working on the play?” Jean asked. She was dressed in denims that rose all the way up to her bra and a sweat shirt with an appliquéd kitten clambering anxiously out of a watering can. Her shoulder length hair was messy except for scrupulously combed bangs.

“Yes,” Adele said. “The drill sergeant never sleeps.”

“Ha, ha,” Jean laughed. “Well, Felix, you ought to give Adele a break. You two could come upstairs and eat with me. I made goulash.”

“No, Mother,” Felix said. “Maybe later.”

Adele never knew how to act around Jean. If she followed Felix’s example, her demeanor would hardly be warm. She was raised to be polite to elders, but like her friend she wasn’t always comfortable with chit-chat. As usually happened, a silence stretched between the three of them and eventually Jean edged towards the steps.

“Well, I’ll let you get back to it then…”

“Thanks, Mom.”

When she’d gone, Felix made a little face. It wasn’t exactly mocking, but it seemed to say, ‘What just happened?’ As if it were odd that a mom would offer supper to two teenagers who rarely left her basement except to go to their classes. Feeling angry at him but unsure of exactly why, Adele took a deep breath and began her monologue.

“‘I was in love with Jeff Hammond. Been in love for years. We used to meet each other, constantly, once or twice a week-”

“Can you hit those t’s a little harder? It’s like this…”

Pulling his characteristically slumped shoulders back, Felix launched into the monologue in a perfect impersonation of the old movie idol. Adele stared at him with a mouth like she was eating worms.

“What?”

“You,” she said. “You ought to do it.”

“I didn’t take the class. Besides, I’m not a girl.”

She almost said maybe that was up for debate, but she bit the comment back, turning away to gather up her things. “I’m going home.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you’re tired-”

“I am. You’re right.”

When she turned on her car lights, they shone through the patio doors of the basement, and she saw that Felix had already put the movie back on. If she knew him at all, he’d make a run upstairs for goulash in about two minutes. But he wouldn’t eat it with Jean.

The day of the performance was hectic. Felix had made a list of all the things they needed from home. Adele would bring her own extensive makeup kit, a curling iron, bobby pins, and the 1940’s outfit she’d borrowed from one of her mother’s friends. He would bring a piece of plastic rattan valance to wrap around the base of a plant he was borrowing from the admissions lobby. This would help make the set look more Malaysian, he determined. And he had a piece of cloth his dad had brought from Guam that they could drape over the This-End-Up sofa ubiquitous to all theater department performances at the college.

Tension propelled them through makeup in near silence, but they started to get testy with one another while he was curling her hair. Worrying that he’d burn her skin and ruin the show, his hands trembled and he got the waves around her face wrong. Luckily her brow was just as high and rounded as Bette’s because he doubted he could have talked her into shaving back her hairline, even though Davis had done it herself twice in her career, both times to play Elizabeth I.

“You’re pulling!” she said, punching his arm. He was through with the iron now or else she wouldn’t have dared.

Unperturbed, he spoke through a mouthful of bobby pins, “Don’t forget the line is, ‘We’d always been so careful before about writing in the past.’ You said ‘calling’ instead twice last week and you could still hit those t’s a little more aggressively.

“I’ll pretend each one of them is you,” she muttered.

He smiled for the first time all day.

“That’s right, my queen,” Felix said. “Get it all out.”

Finally there was nothing else he could do and Felix had to leave the stage area and take a seat with the class. As he watched Adele perform her scene, he was glad they’d chosen dark green for her outfit, but he couldn’t help but feel she never quite rose above a level of emotion one might call robotic. It was worse than that she wasn’t as fiery as his favorite actress. Rather she was flat, like someone who’d never felt anything before. Maybe she was on the sociopath spectrum, he wondered. Was there a spectrum for that?

The class applauded nicely for Adele. After the curtain closed on stage, Professor Dupree studied Felix for an awkward moment. He imagined she was realizing how much of a role he’d played in Adele’s final project. Impulsively, he leaned towards her and made a bold suggestion.

“Since I’ve done so much of the work in helping Adele, do you think admissions would let me sign up for the class retroactively, if I could complete all the homework assignments before next Tuesday?”

A moment later, Adele was cautiously descending from the stage in her borrowed pumps. Professor Dupree gave her an empathetic smile.

“That was an interesting choice, Adele.”

“It was all Felix,” she answered.

For a moment, it seemed that the two women were transmitting a silent message to each other. Felix felt if he had a moment, he might figure it out. But then someone up on stage was asking who brought the plastic rattan valance. They needed to break things down quickly to do their monologue from Fame.

When he was done corralling all of their props and the makeup kit, he couldn’t find Adele anywhere. The class was recomposing themselves for the next number and the professor gave him a smile that was thin.

As he stepped out of the student center to see if Adele was having a smoke, he heard Professor Dupree give a gleeful little squeal, saying aloud about the next act, “Oh, I love this one!” He shrugged, thinking with some pleasure that Dupree had always struck him as fatally boring.

Adele was sitting on a picnic table on the smoker’s terrace. She’d unbuttoned the vintage blouse a little, but left her hair up off her neck and face. In the harsh afternoon light, the makeup looked thick, but her eyes were magnificent. He shook a cigarette from his pack as he approached her.

“You were great.”

“No I wasn’t,” she said. “But I’m glad its over.”

He lit his cigarette with a lighter that had a spent flint. After a moment it sparked, but it was too late to continue to argue her defense. He said instead, “You want to come over tonight. We can watch whatever you want.”

I came to the party to see both the brothers. Strangely it was not the one I was in love with who I hoped to hook up with before going home. The one I loved was not an option, a guy a couple of years older than me who was strictly into girls. But his brother, Dillon, was what we called open. We had fooled around in the back of my car once, parked behind the high school, but it hadn’t ended great. He’d been too drunk to concentrate and finally we straightened up the seats and I drove him back to his car across town. I still thought about him a lot – the taste and feel and scent of him and perhaps most that things ended so incompletely.

The party thinned until there were only a few straggling in the foyer, but still I hung back, pretending to read the spines of the books on the shelves in the library. Earlier in the night their mother had shown me this room, waving a dismissive hand at the volumes that climbed to the ceiling.

“But who has time anymore?” she’d asked in a breezy, rhetorical manner. She smiled at me, “I guess when you’re young…”

Linda seemed more human to me in that moment, thought I still didn’t care for her. Earlier that night I’d heard her use the word ‘fag’ about her oldest son.

“I mean honestly, I don’t know why Linus is so sensitive about everything,” she told one of his friends, a girl named Terin who had big red lips and iddy-biddy bangs. “He’s such a fag sometimes.”

Terin and I had exchanged a glance.

I had glanced over at Linus, watching him shrug off the jab, and thinking wryly, ‘I wish.’

He was slenderer than his brother, with a long bony nose and bright green eyes hidden under meticulously polished spectacles. These weren’t eyeglasses as I knew them back then: the huge plastic frames that hid half the face. These were small, clever, brass. They made him look bookish and vaguely historical, which was probably why he chose them. Maybe too why I romanticized him so much.

I used to study Linus like a painter does a muse, but when the muse doesn’t welcome the scrutiny, there are too many veils to peel away. I wanted intimacy with him and when I was so young my hormones and naïveté conspired to convince me that was unattainable. Because the way I saw getting there was steeped in sex and sexuality. I’d never had a solid friendship with a man and didn’t know how that was supposed to work.

Dillon spoke a language I understood more viscerally, a language not of words but of straight up sex.

Even as the summer of my eighteenth year grew sweatier and more still, all the mild breezes of spring spent, even as I fell more in love with Linus, there were more chances to spend time with his brother. We met with mutual friends at the tea house, bantering about topical things now forgotten, smoking too many cigarettes. He had a hunger about him. Despite the fact that he was handsome and athletic, Dillon seemed to always search your glance for admiration. I sensed it about him and I was put off by it. Perhaps I preferred the enigma that was his older brother.

Still I enjoyed watching Dillon for months before our singular hook up. He had golden skin and dark golden curls. His legs were covered in golden hair and rippled with muscles he’d built playing soccer. His hands were broad and square and capable, his lips each full and quick with a reckless grin.

Then a friend of mine who went to military academy with him told me how he used to sleep with a boy that was their classmate. I hadn’t seen this coming. Dillon seemed unattainable until that morsel of gossip. Shortly after, he and I were the last ones to close down the teahouse – me lingering later than was my wont – and with only a slight pass, I opened the door to the fleeting encounter behind the high school.

It was sexy and yet not sexy all at once. In later years I wished I’d made more of the night. We should have gotten out of the car and wandered down over the hill into the grass. There ought to have been night sky and the summer cacophony of cricket and cicada and swiftly running brook.

When they invited me to the party, I was surprised to be asked. I never really thought anyone liked me very much and was often taken aback to be included. I didn’t know if it were Dillon or Linus who proposed my name. I never found out, not that it came to matter.

It was odd to be there, wanting to be loved by one brother and to have sex with the other. Perhaps it wasn’t so much about want as realism and expediency. I knew I stood a chance with Dillon. Linus thought of me as merely a new friend.

As the guests started to leave in groups, while I was hiding in the library, I heard Linus head out with his girlfriend. Their mother even said good night, making a lot of noise about the clean up waiting until the morning. There was one person left standing in the foyer with Dillon when I peered out from the library. It was a girl he’d been talking to much of the night. She had curves for days and hair like an angel in a Renaissance painting.

Dillon glanced my way and rather than be caught, I barreled out a little too quickly, pretending to only then discover how the house had emptied. The girl with the beautiful hair said she needed to get home; she was going on a long road trip the next day. Dillon gave her a kiss before closing the door. He peered through the sidelight until she drove away.

When he turned to study me, I dropped my gaze. It occurred to me that we hadn’t really spoken much since the night in the car. We’d never been alone together since then. I wished I’d never come tonight, but a part of me longed for a chance to be with him again. There was a lonely craving in me that supplanted all better judgment.

“You not tired?” he asked.

“I thought we could hang out.”

He shrugged and I followed him into his bedroom down the hall. We sat on the bed and looked at an album cover together while he talked about things that happened at the party. The scent of him made a kaleidoscope of butterflies circle in my stomach. When I put a hand on his thigh, he stiffened.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

The butterflies dropped as if turned to stone by his tone.

“I thought we might…”

I faltered as he turned his brown eyes on me. Dillon always seemed to have laughing eyes, but tonight they were impenetrable, dense and cold like a pond in winter. I felt myself grow smaller.

“We’re in my mother’s house,” he said. “That was my girlfriend who just left.”

The funny thing is that I can’t remember how I responded. I didn’t say anything to him to change his mind. Yet how he looked as I left or whether I stumbled out or was walked to the door are facts lost to time. What I do remember is the light in his room. There was only one lamp in a corner, casting long shadows over our suddenly sordid tableau. Shadows trailed from his lashes and from his bed and from the soles of my feet to the top of my head. Maybe he softened his rebuke with a smile. I honestly couldn’t say.

The drive back from their remote home on the river seemed interminable. It was hard to believe I’d only passed these landmarks a few hours earlier. The night had left me hanging open, exposed and restless. With the windows down, I could feel the coldness of March on my skin and moving through my hair. I should have turned on the radio and filled my bandwidth with raucous sound, but I made the trip home in silence, wondering what Dillon would tell his brother about my failed pass.

Mariam was quick at everything she did, but when she was angry, another kind of fuel kicked in to keep her jets lit high. He could gauge her irritation by the time it took her to fold laundry or sort the bills and pay them.

The evening was thick, scented with a rain to come, and in the distance he could hear the traffic that ran alongside the subway station. It was late and he was the only one waiting just now. At last he took his phone from his pocket. He stared down at it for a moment before calling home. She answered on the second ring.

“You on the way?”

“Well, I’ve run into a snag.”

“Oh.”

“Well, there were a lot of people because the holiday-”

“The holiday is why I suggested you leave earlier,” she said. “But what about all these people?”

He held the phone away so she wouldn’t hear his sigh. Mariam hated to hear it; she would tell him to stop feeling sorry for himself.

“Of the four card machines, two were out of order, so the lines were twice as long as ever. I almost made it, ran all the way down and even scratched my leg on the escalator, but I was just a couple of seconds too late. I’m sorry, Mariam.”

She took in a breath. It sounded like she dropped something heavily on the counter. It might have been metal: a knife or a spatula maybe.

“The next one will be here in about seven minutes.”

“But you’ll miss Will,” she said. “He never waits – not even for a minute. Remember last week?”

“He saw me running across the lot. I know he did.”

“He’s kind of a prick that way.”

“Isn’t he though?” he said. Perhaps she would direct her ire at the man who always gave him a ride to the end of their drive, providing he didn’t have to wait. “It really was too much this last time. He’s so rude.”

“It’s still your fault,” she said.

“Yes, I know.”

A pause snaked between them, too long and too thin. Finally she said, “I guess I’ll drive into town when you get in, but you’ll have to call me when you pass Dunn Grave so I’ll have about five minutes.”

“Okay,” he said.

“But this has to stop. We have to get your car fixed.”

He didn’t know what to say. They both knew they couldn’t afford the repairs. As it was, they were always a month behind on the house payment. Their little house with the crack in the stoop and the stink of mildew in the bathroom, it was a little bit of nothing that even so they could scarcely afford. How did she imagine that repairing the car was going to happen?

“Call me at Dunn Grave,” she said and she rang off without a good-bye.

“Thank you,” he said a moment too late. She hadn’t heard.

____________

When the train got beyond Mauricetown, the city glow was blotted out by the overhanging trees. If he pressed his face to the glass, he could watch the fireflies begin to light, green stars in a galaxy of woods. He noticed them last week, when he was late the last time. They weren’t visible on the earlier trip; the waning days of summer were still too bright at that time to note them. But if one missed the train and came on the very next one, there they were, something hopeful and beautiful to watch all the dreary ride homeward.

He recalled a night when he was a child, when his father was still alive. It had been the two of them and his sister, returning from the barn after feeding the animals. They spilled out into the night, the three of them, when the sky was purple all but for a ribbon of gold over the mountains.

“Do you see that?” his father whispered. The two children fell silent.

At first, like star gazing, they could not quite see the fireflies. Then they noticed one and then another and then a dozen more and finally countless lights in the dark lower pasture.

“Daddy,” his sister said.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he answered.

They stood in the silence and the night, hearing the throaty noises of the summer bugs, watching the green lights come and go and come again. Behind them, a few pale rectangles marked the windows of their house on the hill, but they were lost in the beauty before them and forgot everything else.

It was hard to tell how long they stood there, three side by side, so calm and happy together, unlike so many other times. Whether it was a minute or an hour, in the years after, he learned it was not long enough. Had he deliberately missed the train tonight so that he’d see these fireflies again? He wondered about that, unable to answer. There had been no broken machines at the station. He’d just sort of moved too slow, his mind elsewhere, until suddenly he heard the train departing. It would never do to let Mariam know the truth.

He was so happy to watch the fireflies of this day, pressed to the train window, that he forgot to call her as the train went through the station at Dunn Grave. Finally, it came to his own stop, the end of the line, where the parking lot lights of the sprawling commuter town wore unholy halos in the muggy evening air.

At the end of the station lot, where a strip mall butted up seamlessly, his gaze fell briefly on the spot where Will usually parked his car while at work. The slot was empty, as he already knew it would be. He faced the street toward home and started walking away from the town. He might have called Mariam, told her he couldn’t get a signal at Dunn Grave, told her he’d wait in the vestibule of the Target until she drove up to get him. Instead, he headed toward home, grim and sure of the argument that would await. He would never know why suddenly he couldn’t lie to placate her, but he trudged into the shadows of the county road like a child going to meet the strap.

When the last street light was at his back, he started to notice the fireflies again. He thought of a spot on the road ahead where he could sit and watch them; the porch steps of an empty, plain farm house overgrown with Virginia creeper. The iron gate cried out when he pressed through, and while it startled an owl out of a hole in the eaves, it did not startle him. Nothing about the house frightened him tonight, though at times he’d thought it vaguely sinister. In the autumn, if he glanced over just as his car lights flashed on the dusty window glass, he feared seeing a grim face looking out. Tonight it was merely a lonely old thing, dead inside and out, with a little of its bones poking through its outsides, like a deer rotting open on the roadside.

He sat on the step and looked out into the familiar points of light.

It had been a long time since the night that he and his sister and his father shared this simple pleasure. He remembered when the memory of it still was fresh, when he was a younger man, and he recalled that for a while it lay dormant, pushed aside by many other cares, only some his own. But since last week, it was as clear as if it had just happened. It seemed like a sort of magic was waiting to unfold. Perhaps there was an enchanted door somewhere, maybe inside the old house, that would spill him out into that other meadow and that other night. He could steal up softly beside the three figures, the tall one and two little ones. His steps would have to be still, so as not to frighten them, but if he could manage it, he’d stay as long as they had stayed and then he’d wait longer still, until the last light went out.

When I was a kid, I became enchanted with Cinderella stories, but my versions never had princesses. They had houses and they had witches. It was the house and the witch who would be transformed and made beautiful. Homes should always be sweet; women should always be gorgeous. I must have thought this as a kid and clearly popular society is still largely convinced its true.

My favorite place to draw was the dining room because there was no place else to spread out the typing paper I took from my mother’s desk and the assortment of random colored pencils that hadn’t gone missing yet. There were corner windows in that room, looking out over a pasture and a scrap of back yard. When the chickens were out, they littered the grass like folds of white towels – the crowns each a smear of blood. Sometimes when I looked up through the smudged glass I saw my mother coming back from the barn. Her plaid jacket was frayed at the cuffs and her hair was ruffled messily by the work. She always seemed tired.

The first iteration.

I would draw a house and a woman softly, the pencil whispering on the page and leaving only the vaguest impression. The woman would have worried bags under her eyes and a ragged gown. The house would have loose shudders and a shaggy lawn. It had to be drawn lightly so that I could cover it over with the magical transformation. I thought it was cheating to erase the lines, so instead I would add more pigment on top, burying the first and deliciously tragic version under the adorable cheer to follow.

The change.

With bold strokes of my pencil the house would be reimagined with pristine woodwork and flowering shrubbery. Birds would appear in the formerly barren skies, a few limp letters ‘m’ that are somehow sparrows or larks in flight. Even to grownups one never need explain that these are birds.

A sun with lines of radiant warmth appeared over the trees.

With greater care still the burdened witch became a mighty queen, her eyes ringed with such lashes that the dimly drawn wrinkles were all but undetectable. With my pencil I sketched over her dismal schmatta, layering on top a diaphanous skirt with hundreds of folds. Messy hair vanished under a mantle of exuberant curls; the bitter mouth fold budded into a hopeful rose. If I could find the crayon called peach, I’d bring the blood to her cheeks.

I made the messy and neglected into something ordered, manicured, and styled. If it failed to convince me, I added flowers and more eyelashes. I might have flourished in marketing.

In truth I was playing at something adults rarely learn to examine, whether or not the picturesque is superior to the authentic. There is a reason that we have apps to place crowns of flowers on our Snapchat photos; a glow to our Instagram selfie to blur away the pores; the framework of Facebook to describe the perfect weekend, leaving out the parts where we quarreled over which credit cards to use. We are terrified of loose ends, of things and people gone ragged. Perhaps the animal in us knows how quickly we can be toppled, the way a rabbit knows that once the fox has them in its jaws, there are only seconds before the end.

The blood widens a pink circle in the snow as the black eyes of the rabbit reflect a cloudless blue sky. Burying its nose in the warmth of the rabbits breast, the fox eats quickly amid the smell of iron and meat and frosty grasses. His breath rises up around them, a fog veil to soften the truth that this is how the circle goes unbroken.

If we are to survive on the terms that make us human, cooperation within the growing village of humanity, without losing our grip on the one power that helps us maintain our place, a self-convincing sense of contentment, we must embroider reality, making over everything that we find dim with bright colors. If our grip on the story loosens and we are forced to see how quickly our shutters rot, perhaps the entire fabric of our narrative will spill out of control. Grass that needs our hands to chase away the chicory and pokeberry might return to wilderness.

Vancy Jordan was on the fast track at the prestigious Paris-based couture house Millard et Jaspes until last week, when she stumbled unwittingly into a decades-old political scandal. Miles Orne, the creative director of M & J’s American studio, Haute Shack, was Jordan’s biggest fan until this week, calling her a ‘rising star’ in a People Magazine article earlier this year. Now the junior designer is out of a job and wondering if she’ll ever work in fashion again.

Enter Monica Lewinsky, a figure in a political scandal that Vancy admits she knew only a little about until this week. “It’s weird to think my political hero is basically the reason I’m now a pariah in the world of couture.” Jordan blushed as she mused, “I mean, fashion and culture and history are all this byzantine tapestry. I get it. I just didn’t connect the right threads.”

In July, Millard et Jaspes did what all fashion forward design houses are doing this year, bidding to design the most coveted outfit of the season. No, it isn’t the next red carpet dress for Michelle Obama. The one frock all of the fashion world is vying to create is the outfit Hillary Clinton will wear to her inaugural ball.

“This is her-story in the making, ” Miles Orne said in July. “Everyone is asking, what will it be? Is it a tux with tucks? Or a dress with pant legs hiding coyly in the drape of the cloth? Speculation is high and we’re not getting any help from the Clinton camp.”

Indeed, when pressed for details on how the Secretary of State will approach fashion when she takes office, the former first lady has been conspicuously vague, saying on Ellen in February, “I don’t NOT like dresses, but – you know – I’m someone who likes to get things done and, boy, that sure is easier in flats and a pantsuit.”

And when asked by Joy Behar on the View in August what she’d wear to her Inaugural Ball, Secretary Clinton replied, “I’ll cross that bridge when and if the American people choose me to be their next president.” Amid a roar of applause from the audience, Clinton added, “But probably white.”

This was just the kind of glimpse into the candidate’s mind that Millard et Jaspes had been wanting. The five second clip went viral in the fashion community, with Isaac Mizrahi tweeting, “I’d love to drape this wonk goddess head-to-toe in platinum chain mail. She’s a warrior! Fierce!”

Last week as the team at Shack finalized drawings for their ball gown concept, Miles Orne turned over the design of Secretary Clinton’s swearing-in ceremony outerwear to Jordan.

“I was thrilled. The image of Secretary Clinton taking her oath of office will live down in history. I wanted a hat for her that was both cozy grandma and world traveler. It needed a dash of Paris, but I wanted something fuzzy and warm because January. Blue just seemed right on so many levels.” That was when she grabbed a lapis coloring pencil and in a few confident strokes perched a blue beret on the head of the former FLOTUS.

But once Orne realized Jordan had intended to submit a sketch of Secretary Clinton wearing a blue beret to her own inauguration ceremony, his laughter quickly subsided.

“He was like a mad man,” Jordan said. “He accused me of being a plant. He said that with our deadline on the bid so tight, my drawings might very well have been overlooked. Then he said people had been hanged for less and I was like OMG.”

Still reeling from the events of the past week, Vancy is considering taking her case to the courts in the hopes that her story will change the way junior designers are treated in the fashion world. Over a cappuccino at Toby’s Estate in Williamsburg on Friday, she admitted that’s a long shot.

“All I’ve done for the past three years is eat, sleep – I don’t know, breath? – the world of Millard et Jaspes. Fashion has been my life since I was a kid. When they were working me full-time for basically lunch money, my Dad was like, ‘Come home, baby.’ He offered me a job at his psychiatric practice. Even when I barely had enough to go to yoga or to keep my brows on fleek, I wouldn’t give up.”

While catastrophe was avoided before the controversial sketches left the inner sanctum of Millard et Jaspe, the fallout for Vancy Jordan has been profound. In addition to having security escort her out of the studio, Shack’s entire team of senior designers have been spreading the word around the clock that in Orne’s eyes Jordan is a saboteur.

As my high school graduation grew nearer, my father sent away for my class ring.I wore it for about a year or two before it embarrassed me to put it on.No one I knew advertised they finished high school through jewelry and I didn’t want to either.The ring was exactly what it should have been: large and golden with a ruby stone and engravings to show I concentrated on The Arts.A pair of brushes cross over a painter’s amoebic palette and some Greek letters make the case for the man my father thought I was becoming.

The ring still surfaces now and then, floating to the top of a box of forgotten things from about the age of ten up through my twentieth year. In that box there is also a keychain with a picture of an old friend in it; a few chess pieces from a set my mother made me in ceramics class;blue and white shards of a Chinese umbrella holder that I cut my knee on when I was nine; shells from a beach where a girl and I sat in the blast of January winds not talking about things we might.

The keychain is a tapered square of turquoise plastic with a white tip on the narrow end.In the tip there is a lens and when you look through it you see my old friend.She is on the beach, her thick dark blond hair pushed behind one ear in defiance of a breeze off the water behind her.When she and I first became friends, my world was small; my best friends were family and it was a joyful discovery to build my own friendship from scratch. We were close at one time and luckily it did not end in fire, as some of my relationships did when I was younger.Rather we just drifted apart, first in our interests and later geographically.Before social media, we were as good as invisible to one another for over a dozen years.Now we reach out from time to time to say hello.

During all those years when many friendships were considered not only diminished but severed by lost addresses and by telephone numbers that no longer worked, I would occasion upon that keychain, squint into it and try to remember something about how she came to give it to me.Had she gone to the beach alone or with one of her more loyal childhood friends?Had we met for lunch, she proffering the memento as I worked out in my head who I’d be partying with later that night?

My mother didn’t handle my growing up very well. Two dreamers who were much happier at home than out in the world, we needed one another mutually when I was young.It must have been hard to see me making friends and moving outward into the world, while she was still fixed in a place defined by her phobias and her traditionalism.When I was seventeen she and I were at our most tumultuous point.In between our heated arguments about where I was going and who I was going out with – why did I like so and so more than my own family and what did we know about their people? – she would be moved to do very kind things.One of them was the chess set, although by the time she finished it and presented it at Christmas, there were already changes in my worldview that made me feel only lackluster about the gift.

Rendered in blue and grey, the Civil War iteration of the game did not suit who I was becoming – a person with growing disgust for a romantic take on rich southern slaveowners who turned on their own neighbors rather than follow the shifting moral imperative of their country.

Having watched the film Gone With the Wind at nine and consuming the book greedily afterward, I spent the first half of my teen years in a love affair with the antebellum south. I wrote and rewrote novels with heroines who lived on plantations and wore hoop skirts.With each rewrite my shifting principles showed evermore. As I discovered feminism, my heroine became pluckier. I added character details to make her seem less organized around feminine norms.Now she liked to sneak off bare footed to go fishing when she wasn’t sparring with our enigmatic and handsome hero.

As I discovered my empathy for the economically disadvantaged, my heroine developed a friendship with a ‘po-white’ family down the road from the Big House and helped their ‘clean but respectable’ Irish children with their lessons in between trips to the trout creek. Just as I may have been likely to start writing a slave rebellion into the plot, I grew tired of the whole Southern aristocracy schtick altogether.By the time I received the chess set, it felt like a postcard from another year to another me, although I was careful to pretend I loved it.My mother is very, very sensitive.

At the age of ten I was well in the midst of my romance with all things old world and opulentwhen I discovered an umbrella holder in the cluttered storage cum laundry room in our basement.Made of thick china and hand-painted in the Asian fashion with blue flowers and birds on a white field, it seemed like a relic from a much finer home than our fly-specked little ranch house in the country.Perhaps this was the last vestige of the grand manor our family used to own on the Mississippi, I speculated – until my mother told me they were a dime a dozen in the seventies.

The top was broken and looked a little like the shape of the Coliseum, with pierced arches left incomplete where the missing pieces used to fit.I found some of the broken bits in the bottom of the vessel and pestered my parents to buy me crazy glue so I could fix this treasure.I was still working on the restoration months later – frustrated that not all the pieces had been saved by my parents – when a tumble with my sister landed me on a jagged point that split my knee open like a cruel smile.They stitched it closed and it still looked like a punished mouth for weeks, weeping blood at the iodine-stained threads when I flexed my leg a bit too much.For a couple years easily I worried that somehow I’d crack it open again, even when all that was left was a quite sturdy white scar, a lumpy albino worm where the mouth had once ruefully grinned.I still have the umbrella holder and the shards; the mend was never complete.

I don’t remember gathering the shells with Jenny, but a visceral thread woven into the beginning of my manhood hangs free of me, teased even now by the mood of a wintry beach.When all the umbrellas have been tucked away and the children have returned to school, beach towns become something more like wilderness again.They become raw and savage: the breakers are cold knives nosing the sand, the blackened tangles of seaweed like so many Medusa headdresses abandoned. No matter where I am, when cold air that smells like salt water hits me, I am taken back to a Carolina beach and seventeen.

We walked with our heads down, our chins protecting our throats as the wind tore at our curls and rippled our too thin clothes.It had been an awkward holiday, me liking Jenny’s green-haired artist friend we had come to visit so much that the three of us fell into a strange discord. In youth we wear our jealousy loosely on chapped lips, with faces still too childlike to hide our fleeting pain and rage.Yet we are already learning to ignore what we think we will not be able to change.And so Jenny continued to love me and I made funny faces and let the incoming storm off the water lift my hair into a wild black mop that she caught in her camera.When my whimsical bravura was spent, we sat in the sand not talking about anything, unsure yet sure that the holiday had already pulled loose what had gathered us together.The silence felt intimate, but we were no longer.

In the cold mist we watched the tide go out while three broken shells found a home in my pocket.It has been over twenty years and I have yet to send them back to sea.

It was true that he lurked outside the A & P and true too that he stared. When one glanced away from him, Russell had moved from his typical base – a shuffling path among the shopping carts just outside the electronic doors – to walking right alongside your car. It was startling how he seemed to have teleported the distance. Mom always locked the doors when we saw Russell in the parking lot.

“Some say he’s harmless,” she’d say. “But I don’t know…”

We were terrified of Russell Green. A tall black man of indeterminate years, he was a fixture of our childhood. At least on days when we went grocery shopping. Looking back, I can’t think of a single thing he ever did in our presence to evoke our response to him. Except perhaps to be born black – something that in the south is a handicap and a risk in the eyes of many.

Mom once said she’d heard he was quite a scholar in his youth, but that he’d been roughed up by some boys (I always assumed they were white) and had taken a blow on the head. Her tone implied it was pitiable, but she still locked up the station wagon when she saw him. I didn’t know what to do with his backstory when I was a kid, but in the years since I’ve colored it until he is almost a mythic martyr. I imagine him as a slender youth, dressed in a cardigan, wearing smart glasses like Malcolm X. The light glints off of the frames as he sits under a tree, writing an essay for school. His mother is Oprah Winfrey and she nails it in a calico apron, a modern day queen sitting in makeup for three hours to give her the dry elbows of a hotel maid.

The truth is it is hard to imagine it differently for me. My understanding of the black struggle has been spoon fed to me through the lens of too many white film makers. Perhaps the legend of Russell was partly true – that he was good in school. But maybe he would have wanted to use those smarts to get a job at IBM and not to change the world in protest. That would not occur to me because when white storytellers tell black lives, they talk about blacks who changed America via the remove of a dais and a microphone.

When I try to put the pieces together about Russell – and maybe it is fetishizing to even try or an exercise in lancing the boil of childhood’s racism – I come up short. He was a black man and some said a mad man and he was a lurker and a looker, but more than that he was a stranger. The fact that he spent his time skulking or loitering the parking lot of the grocery store gave him an unglamorous fame and because of that he sticks out in my memory. To be fairer still, the A & P was in his neighborhood and he never bothered anyone, never hurled insults or begged favors. He was just there. In an odd way, showing up on the regular gave him name recognition, a perverse argument in favor of the marketing stratagem of consistent exposure.

Nowadays it might not happen so, if for no other reason than that the grocery store would be on the outskirts of town in a well-lit suburban haven on the other side of too many highways for the lost or the deranged of neighborhoods to wander upon. The A & P of my childhood was on South Street, but all the white grownups I knew called that area Nigger Town. This because this short road of small stucco houses – being evermore bought up and leveled for strip malls and burger huts – was where black people lived. It had no jurisdiction of its own, no real autonomy and independence from the mechanisms of a white establishment. So while there was nothing to threaten the status quo on these three blocks except perhaps one mad man walking the rows of the parking lot, daring to stare at white families in their wood-paneled station wagons – it clearly needed a name to delineate it from the rest of town, to demarcate the differences between us and to levy upon the darker skinned a moniker meant to demean.

Then black artists took that same word and made it their own. Still white people chafe not that it exists but that now it is wielded by black hands, spoken by black lips, linked to new cultural moorings by black ingenuity and will. We hear the debate: why is it okay when they say it? I will not speak for black people to answer; they have their own voice. What little I can do is to peel back every ignorant thing I ever learned to expose and dismiss it, one remembrance at a time.

In the minds of my people, Russell was to be feared and to locked out, but it has become clear to me in my life that the real social menace was on the inside of the glass all along.